A niche is a result that you get or a problem that you solve for a specific group of people that no one else wants to serve.
Whether you are starting out your freelancing journey, or you are already well into running an established agency, creating and defining the niche that you go after and that you serve is absolutely critical to gaining any success and momentum within your business.
Seth Godi author of things like This is Marketing. He says that a niche is the smallest viable audience. I really like that.
Specifically, he says, “A Core group that you know, you understand and seek to interact with and so delight them that they will tell others.”
One of the biggest benefits of choosing a niche is that when you repeatedly go after that niche and create content and solve problems around something specific, you automatically build yourself up as the go-to expert for that particular problem and group of people.
By dedicating yourself to a specific niche, you essentially become a voice for an audience, which is almost above the level of expert. By creating a niche, you are naturally creating a loyal following.
The group of people that you decide to serve and you double down on will eventually turn to you for more and more of their problems. What’s really interesting is that when you focus on something specific, other people in kind of like satellite niches, become attracted and drawn to you.
They start asking the question, “Will this work for me as well?”
The goal here is to find a group of people with specific characteristics that you want to serve with a problem that you can solve or a result that you can achieve that no one else in your marketplace wants to serve.
In this blog post, we’re gonna look at five different niche categories that you can go after and begin to dominate within your marketplace.
Niche Category #1: Problem
What I mean by problem is that you create a niche that focuses on a specific problem that people have within their business.
Now, let’s get clear on what a problem is. A problem is something that your customers lay awake at night, thinking about it’s something that they worry about and that stresses them out.
It’s worth saying at this point that no one ever wakes up thinking, “Oh my God, I need a marketing consultant.”
No one thinks about that as a problem. Needing a marketing consultant or needing a marketing strategy is not a problem. The trap that a lot of agencies fall into is they think the thing that they sell is the thing that someone wants.
I need you to start thinking about from your customer’s perspective. What are they laying awake at night worrying and thinking about?
Problems tend to start with sentences like, “I have a lack of…” or “I need more…” or “I need less…”. It also has things like, “I get so stressed about…” or “I have no idea how to…”
These are things that people think about at night when there’s no one else around them. They think, “I wish I had more customers”, or “I wish I had more money in the bank”, or “I wish I had fewer refund requests”, or “How do I reach new markets?”
These need to be problems that people are thinking about inherently.
No one thinks about their business in terms of, “Oh, I wish I had a new marketing consultant.”
Instead, they’re thinking, “How in the hell am I gonna keep up with my competitors when everyone else seems to be selling online?” or “How in the hell am I gonna start increasing sales?” or “How am I gonna get a handle on my ad budget?”
You need to start thinking about things that they are very emotionally attached to. The problem you solve is not marketing or sales. It’s not web design. It’s not funnel design.
Problems are things that human beings think about.
Niche Category #2: Process
The way I like to think about this is process being part of the marketing and sales process so you could hone in on one specific stage of the marketing process.
As we are all funnel builders, you could even focus in on one specific stage of the marketing funnel. Marketing funnels, marketing sales, all of that has lots of very specific stages.
We have things like lead capture, lead generation, lead nurture. You have qualification, you have selling, you have upselling, you have refund requests, you have support tickets all the way from the customer has no idea this product exists all the way over to they’re a repeat buyer and they refer and they love buying from you and they’re profitable and they’re happy.
All of those stages in between you could focus in on an individual one of them. For example, you could find people who already have certain stages of a marketing funnel in place, hone in on it, and absolutely crush it for them. That’s for people who have already got that part of the marketing funnel in place.
I am telling you right now that there is massive opportunity for funnel agencies to take one specific part of the marketing funnel journey and absolutely crushing that part of the process for their customer rather than trying to provide everything.
For example, let’s take video advertising. If you just focused on video advertising, you could find customers who are already doing video advertising and then help them increase the number of sales they generate per video, the number of leads they generate, and their cost per lead and start working on specifically the part of the process that they’re already doing.
That means you’re not necessarily trying to sell them the idea of doing that part of the process, but you’re trying to optimize it. E-Commerce businesses, for example, are crushing video ads. What they want is someone to help make that process more efficient.
One of the big mistakes a lot of agencies make is they think, well, I have to introduce this new method to them. Whereas, why don’t you go and find people who are already doing that method and make it way, way, way more efficient?
Niche Category #3: Products
You could create a niche that focuses on certain types of products or what I call product categories. Now, when I refer to products, I don’t mean things like cosmetics or fitness equipment. What I mean is the different ways of delivering results to the customer.
For example, subscription products, one-off products, low ticket products, information products, high volume low sale products, and high ticket products. Basically, the way that we categorize the product delivery and how we charge the customer.
For example, one-off high ticket consultancy sales are very, very different from low ticket splinter product sales, right? There are so many different product categories out there and more ones are being created every single day.
We’ve just seen that BMW has actually introduced a subscription product for heated seats within their cars. So I want you to get creative and start thinking about how different businesses deliver results to their customers and what type of product do I find exciting to try and optimize?
Maybe you could only work on splinter products and help customers who are already using splinter products to increase the number of sales they generate per customer or per day or per ad, or you could be the agency that specializes in the transition between product stages.
For example, a seven-day trial is a product type and a lifetime subscription is also a product type. So maybe you could specialize in that transition period for SaaS businesses between seven days free and lifetime subscription.
Hopefully, with that example as well, you can begin to see the power of combining some of these niche categories. So creating a niche is the cornerstone of any successful business. I’ve been saying this for a long time, businesses are defined by the markets that you serve, not by the products that you sell.
Here at Sell Your Service, we help you build your business around the audience that you want to serve. From mindset to specific tactics and methodologies, we cover all of that on this channel.
Niche Category #4: Results
This is a bit of a tricky one. Typically, a lot of people think that a niche is an industry and I don’t believe that to be true.
In fact, I think going after a particular industry is a bad niche, but we can get close to that by looking at the types of results that your customers get their customers.
So you have to bear with me on this one. There’s a little bit of niche inception going on. I want you to think about the types of results that your customers get their customers.
For example, if you work with financial consultants, the result they get their customer is financial stability or wealth.
Results are ultimately what your customer’s customers are buying. So you could build your niche around the type of results that your customers get. Maybe your ideal clients help their customers with weight loss or content creation or better self-esteem.
The reason I like this is because you can go after something that then spreads across multiple industries, but is still very, very specific.
For example, let’s say that you want to work with businesses who help their customers create more social media content. That means you can start to work with coaches and consultants, but it also means that you can work with apps. You can work with software tools, you can work with communities, groups, membership, programs, and everything in.
The results in that example that they get their customers is more followers and more content. So you get to flip that and say, if you help your customers get more followers, we help you get more customers. This is a really good way to start bridging that gap between things you love and things you’re good at as well.
For example, if you spend a lot of time at the gym, maybe you want to help customers who help their customers with weight loss or having a healthier life. If you work with a lot of financial managers, but you wanna start working in the app space, start thinking about the commonalities between them.
For example, if you work with a lot of coaches and consultants who help their customers with wealth management and having a better financial future, maybe then you could start working with SaaS applications or apps or software or whatever. That also help people manage their wealth and their financial health.
Niche Category #5: Customer
So every business has multiple different types of customer and customer categories are essentially the stage that they are at in relation to the person selling a product. All businesses have multiple types of customers.
You have first time customers. You have customers who have literally just bought. You have customers who are looking for a refund. You have long time customers.
You have engaged customers. You have unengaged customers. You have 80/20 rule customers, ones who spend a lot of money, but don’t take a lot of time or in the inverse customers who take a lot of time and don’t spend a lot of money.
There’s two different ways that you can niche down on the customer category. For example, you could either say we help increase the number of X or Y.
For example, we help increase the number of subscription customers, or we help reduce the number of refund customers or you can look at converting X to Y. For example, we help convert first time customers into high ticket customers, or we help convert trial customers into long term survivor.
You could say that we help convert X into Y. For example, we help convert refund request customers into high ticket customers, or we turn high ticket customers into subscription customers.
Now, the key with customer categories is making sure that your customers know what type of customers they want. For example, most agencies want more clients and more high ticket customers.
So, typically, that’s what I tend to sell the concept. I know that most agencies actually need recurring revenue based customers, but often they don’t know that. So I don’t tend to sell that.
It’s kind of the same with coaches. If you work with coaches, they might say they want more clients, but you might think, I know they need to have more subscription customers. You wanna work on selling what they know they want.
This is really critical to understand if you know that splinter product customers or trial customers are really useful, but your ideal market isn’t looking for that. It’s very difficult to sell it.
One of the rules of sales is you can only ever sell something that someone wants not just needs. Even if they need it, they still need to want it as well.
So these five niche categories all have their own problems that need solving and all of them have large groups of would be potential customers.
As a freelancer or an agency or a marketer, you are in the unique position where you get to choose who you work with and narrow down exactly the types of results that you are going to get your customer. There is massive potential for your business if you focus down and niche.
Every single successful business owner I have ever spoken to says, “I wish I had niched down earlier.”.
If you can understand the way that you would phrase that your business becomes very different and you begin to separate yourself. For example, instead of saying, “Oh, we’re an agency or we build marketing funnels.”
You now get to say things like we turn SaaS trial customers into long term 24 month subscriptions, or we turn refund requests into high ticket sales.
